Saturday, February 27, 2016

Oh my goodness...I've had this idea in my head for months and it's so exciting to see it finally finished! It was the project that kept getting pushed to the back burner so I could finish other things. Prepare for photo overload below, because this board is bright and colorful and I couldn't help but take a ton of pictures of it!

The board has a few different activities on it:

Days of the week that velcro on and off and place to display the current day

Thermometer with a sliding arrow to show the temperature

Ornaments that hang on buttons to display which season it is

Felt weather board to create weather scenes

Clear pocket to store the felt pieces for the weather scene

To make this board, I used a 12x18 inch piece of royal blue felt for the background and a 9x12 inch of baby blue felt for the weather board. For the rest of the board, I just used scrap pieces of felt left over from other projects. I also used assorted buttons and a piece of clear vinyl to make the pocket. I used my embroidery machine to embroider all of the words, and I cut most of the shapes with my Sizzix die cutter.

For the back of the board, I used up scraps from my quiet book pages! I love this beautiful rainbow of color!!

I added large eyelets to the top corners of the board so I could hang it on the wall with command hooks.

I hope you all enjoy it! I won't be selling these right now, but I'll be happy to provide instructions if anyone has questions and would like to make one!

Tuesday, January 19, 2016

It's been a year since I started this blog to share my crafts, and I'm so happy to look back and see how my style has changed (and hopefully improved) in a year! One of the first projects I shared on this blog was a Valentine's Day Quiet Mat. I hand sewed all of the activities on that mat, and I loved how everything turned out!

Now, a year later, I have a lot more experience with my sewing machine AND a new embroidery machine! I was able to make two of these books in the time it took me to sew that one quiet mat from last year. Two of these books are listed for sale in my Etsy shop and they would make great gifts for little ones on Valentine's Day! Take a look below for more pictures!

There are three pages with different activities. The first page has three flowers that button on and off of the stems. The second page has four chocolate shapes that velcro on with their matching shape names. The last page has a mail box that holds two felt envelopes, plus a sweet Valentine's Day message in each envelope!

Here are some close up pictures of the activities:

And because I love this fabric so much, here are some pictures of the backs of the pages!

Thursday, December 31, 2015

I took a break from selling on Etsy for most of December to devote some time to personal craft projects and learning to use my Christmas gift from my husband...a new embroidery machine! I am in love with it and I can't wait to make some fun toys for the shop with it. In the meantime, I wanted to make another quiet book for Rhys to play with during our Christmas road trip, and I finished it just before we left!

This book is similar to my first Rainbow Quiet Book, but I included different activities in this book and added decorate buttons to most of the pages to use up some of my button stash :) I also fastened the pages with button holes and baby links this time, instead of grommets and binder rings.

I embroidered my son's name onto a piece of felt and sewed it to the cover. It's not perfectly straight but I'm happy with it!

The red page is a lacing activity (remember my Quidditch lacing page?) where he can lace a white string through the loops of ribbon on the rainbow. The string is stored behind the clouds at the bottom of the page and I glued blue felt to the tip of the string to make it stiffer and easier to lace.

The orange page is an I Spy activity with different colored button shapes hidden in the white buttons. I also sewed matching buttons around the border as a guide for what to look for.

The yellow page has a rainbow of six zippers to play with, because he can never have enough zippers!

The green page is a buckle/weaving activity that includes six buckles. It was a little tricky trying to figure out the placement of the buckles to get them to overlap without covering each other, but I love how it turned out!

The blue page is a shape matching activity, and it was my first attempt at using my embroidery machine! The shapes were all sewn by the machine which is why they look awesome and perfect :)

The turquoise page was my second attempt with the embroidery machine and again...I was so impressed! I embroidered the color names onto each piece of felt, and then stitched a rectangle around each one to make them into little tiles that Rhys can velcro on and off.

Finally, the purple page is a simple little abacus activity to practice counting! The purple felt warped a little while I was pulling the strings tight to sew them down, but at least I know the strings and beads are secure!

Here's a close up of the button holes...next time I might make them a little bigger but I think these worked out well for a first attempt!